Video Thesaurus

In 2013 we were invited to create an installation project for Getty Images at the Cannes Lions 60th Festival of Creativity. It was quite a challenge to represent one of the worlds’ biggest moving image archives and our response was to create a beautiful, bespoke, audio visual installation controlled by the audience. This was our first fully interactive installation project and it allows visitors to the Getty Images stand to explore their extensive video archive.

The installation displays over 800 video clips simultaneously across a huge 14 metre long video wall as individual animated film strips that are then activated by a set of Xbox Kinects, allowing visitors to browse and interact with them through the selection of different keyword metadata. Each video clip reveals its network of relationships to other clips on the wall, transforming the whole installation into a giant video thesaurus; allowing people to explore different themes and subjects across each collection of curated video content.

For this project we invited programmer Marek Bereza from “is this good” to develop an Openframeworks software outcome for the project. This led to the creation of a totally new video codec to run the installation due to the large amount of video data we wanted to use and how it needed to be displayed.